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Dennis the Menace and The Family Circus, 4/15/22

Oh, man, this is it. This is the nadir. The Keane Kids have ruined their parents’ outing to an art museum, Dolly and Jeffy are consumed with self-loathing, Billy is actively furious at the family’s attempt to to expand their cultural horizons. Meanwhile, what’s going on with Dennis? He’s weeping because he stubbed his toe and now his mom is offering to pray for him? Honestly, what the fuck. That is so much less menacing than the Family Circus that the menace levels could not be detected by the most carefully calibrated instruments menace science has to offer. For shame, for shame!

Mary Worth, 4/15/22

Sadly, this whole week has been taken up not by more hilarious dream sequence action but by Toby telling Mary about her little Cal problem in judiciously elliptical detail, which has been significantly less fun. I do like today’s strip, though, as it implies that Ian cares less about Toby’s romantic fidelity than he does about her ability to “handle” sticky situations, which I assume means that either Helen or Cal — or possibly both — will be dead by the end of the week.

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The Lockhorns, 4/14/22

Really loving Loretta’s expression here. Instead of starting a sentence to sound like a compliment but twisting it into a cruel taunt by the end, as is his wont, Leroy has instead simply started a sentence to sound like a compliment only to use it as a springboard for some dumb bit of wordplay he thought up during dinnertime’s customary icy silence, and frankly, she can’t figure out how to feel about that. With the cruel taunt, at least she knows he’s thinking about her.

Marvin, 4/14/22

The phrase “social distancing” rocketed to the top of the public’s mind roughly two years ago in the opening stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I don’t know what possibility is sadder: that it took the Marvin creative team that much time to come up with the extremely terrible “smell distancing” variation (it doesn’t even have the same number of syllables, Jesus Christ) or that they came up with it right away but only now have decided that it’s no longer “too soon.”

Judge Parker, 4/14/22

Hey, remember the “April hides out with her family” plotline in Judge Parker that was so boring that I barely ever mentioned it on this blog, which exists entirely to crack wise about the boring antics in the world comic strips? Well, apparently within the Parkerverse it’s was so exciting that it’ll merit building a whole season of streaming TV around it.

Rex Morgan, M.D., 4/14/22

You know what is exciting, for the moment? The current Rex Morgan, M.D., plot! Ha ha, goading a street tough into saying “What’re you going to do — hit me with that broom?” and then immediately hitting him with that broom is a very funny bit and I approve. Mind you, it doesn’t look like our hero’s hitting him particularly hard, but in his defense he is nursing a shoulder injury.

Shoe, 4/14/22

OH MY GOD THERE ARE BIRD JEWS EVERYBODY

JEWS

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Crankshaft, 4/13/22

Once, many years ago, there was a comic strip called Funky Winkerbean about the antics of teenagers. Then someone got the bright idea to spin off the one old person character into his own strip, about old people! Later all the Funky Winkerbean teenagers grew up and become old people in their own right, but that’s a story for another time. Anyway, Crankshaft, the strip about old people, continues to stick to its original old-people mission, and today’s installment, in which two old people angrily yell at each other at the top of their lungs, is a perfect example and I respect it.

Funky Winkerbean, 4/13/22

Oh, I guess the other time to tell the story of the old people Funky Winkerbean characters is now! It turns out Crazy Harry didn’t travel into the metaverse, but rather into his own past, to converse with his younger self, who is eager to learn one thing above all others about his own future, which is: do I get to have [whispers] sex? Ha ha, could you imagine going back to the 1980s heyday of the fun teen characters of Funky Winkerbean, and going up to random newspaper readers and saying, “Hey, you know those teens in Funky Winkerbean? They’re all gonna have sex, eventually, and you’re going to read about it!” They’d literally put you in jail.

Gil Thorp, 4/13/22

“My eyesight is failing! I’ve got grey hair! I’m 55 years old! I can’t believe all of you think I’m a high school student!”